IBM prefers MS Word ...

I don't like making posts like this but I figure its the most effective way of embarrassing IBM into actually doing something about fixing up its archaic and poorly maintained web site.

I recently passed my certification exams for R8.5 System Administration and Application Development and sought to claim the exam fees back from IBM under the 'You Pass - We Pay' benefit included with my annual IBM/Lotus Partner fees.

If you google IBM + 'You Pass - We Pay' and select the second document displayed "You Pass/We Pay Reimbursement Claim Form", then you wind up with a claim form and claim process valid for January 1st, 2000 to June 30th, 2001 complete with fax numbers ... what's a fax number used for again? Don't remind me!

Even worse than that is the fact that there is no way to navigate to the 2009 claim form. Having fought with IBM's web site before, I knew enough to admit defeat early in the game. I logged into Partnerworld and traced through the menus until I found the screen offering me a download of the current claim form in Lotus Wordpro or Microsoft Word format.

Sorry guys... I use Lotus Symphony. It's a great product that's been available for a couple of years now and I really think you guys at IBM should try it out sometime soon. Now since I don't have a copy of Wordpro or Microsoft Word and your document won't load in WordPad (see error below) then can someone tell me how I can claim back my exam fees?




Shame on you IBM - go and fix up your own backyard.
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Documenting the Lotus skeletons in the closet

Folklore.org is a collection of anecdotes about the birth and evolution of the Apple Macintosh. I'm sure there's a shipload of similar stories about the birth and evolution of Notes/Domino and all we need is a dedicated nerd to build the website.

I may be a nerd and I may be dedicated but three-month-old Melanie Rose and her four-year-old brother Adam take up all of my free time.

Any volunteers?
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How to succeed in selling Lotus services ...

I added this comment to a Linked-In group earlier this morning but I figured it was a valid blog post in it's own right... Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Comments about Lotus lack of marketing and mistakes with IBM Workplace and losing market share etc are soooooo last year. Get over it and get into the future! If you are going to stay with Notes (like me) then get your finger out and DO something about expanding the market for Domino. There are managers at IBM/Lotus in Australia who can and do help Lotus Business Partners. If you go to them with a great idea then they'll help you. All you have to do is show them a Win-Win scenario and they'll come to the Party. I have two ZERO-COST (apart from phone calls) marketing programs running with IBM right now and the results are fantastic - two new paying clients this month and two similar client appointments lined up for January plus a public marketing event scheduled for February.

If you are not based in Sydney then I'm happy to give you some ideas that have worked for me with IBM/Lotus. Contact me on 0435 094 694 or via email on 'gdodge - bcd - net - au'. I presume you can fill in the blanks :)

Microsoft Business Partners need not apply. Nothing personal, but I want to work with people who don't take a bet on every horse in the race. If you've got the cojones to stay Yellow then I'll show you the money.

BTW... I guess the same marketing techniques would work in other geographies so I'm happy to pass these tips onto non-Australian Business Partners. I can't promise that your Lotus sales office will respond as positively as Lotus Australia has done.
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How do you measure productivity in Lotus consulting work?

IMHO John Cook's blog about why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity sums up the major problem in the IT consulting industry. The problem (restated) is that IT consumers have no easy way of determining the productivity of their incumbent Business Partner. Here's an example:

Last month I was called into a customer site to help fix their Domino cluster. Their previous Business Partner (who had also been providing PC support services plus new hardware plus anything else they could sell the customer) had been unsuccessful in setting up the Domino cluster and that had been the last straw for the client who showed them the door and then set about getting new service providers for Notes and networking and everything else. I was one of the Partners recommended to him by a Big Blue friend and so I got the Notes work.

Now reinstalling a Domino server and setting up a Domino cluster isn't rocket science. I'm sure 90% of the readers of this blog could have done the same job without any fuss, but this job was clearly beyond the skill set of their previous supplier. So why do customers continue to pay good money to incompetent Business Partners?

My guess is that customers have no easy metric to measure IT tasks. You can tell a Postal workers that s/he must deliver xxx letters per day or a brickie that they must lay yyy bricks per day but how do you measure the productivity of IT workers? In old-style programming you could ask for zzz lines of code per day, but how do you create a similar metric in XPage web components or in system admin work?

I believe the trend towards System Integration has accelerated this problem. A traditional Lotus Partner takes pride in their product and their skill set and associated Lotus certifications, and has no problem in declaring comparative ignorance in (say) Windows networking issues. They would rather stick to their knitting and are happy to see other IT work go to other specialist IT providers. On the other hand the non-specialist 'System Integrator' has no clear boundaries on what they will sell to a customer and has the temptation to work towards grabbing the customers entire IT budget and then finding a way of providing lower cost services (while still charging at the original skilled rate) in order to maximize their profit. If Lotus consulting services aren't making a profit then they might consider reskilling their people in Sharepoint and getting their technicians to multitask with Lotus and Sharepoint consulting work. If the volume of Sharepoint work is increasing then maybe forget about doing Lotus work entirely (but keep demanding the right to sell annual Lotus license subscriptions to existing customers).

The problem is that (apart from failing their certification exams) there is no obvious bottom line for a consultant when maintaining their technical skills in Lotus software. The atrophying of their Lotus skills happens one day at a time and their customers don't notice that they are receiving a sub-standard consulting product because they have no external 'nnn-bricks-per-day' IT standard with which to measure their supplier.

I've blogged on this topic before, but this time I'm asking a question:

How do you show your own value-added technical superiority in Lotus software to a customer when the customers doesn't have sufficient Lotus technical skills to see through the smoke-and-mirrors they are being fed by their current incompetent incumbent?

Or, in John Cook's terms, how do you demonstrate that your productivity with Lotus software far exceeds that of your competition?
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Microsoft takes one on the chin - I bet that hurt!

As of last night the US290 million patent infringement judgment against Microsoft has been reaffirmed and the injunction that bars the company from selling current versions of its MS Word software has been reinstated. This also applies to copies of Microsoft Office because they include Microsoft Word as a component of that software suite.

After the initial adverse judgment in August, Microsoft had persuaded the Federal Appeals Court to stay the injunction while it heard the appeal. Now the appeal has been heard and the Federal Court has affirmed the original judgment.

This is going to provide some interesting gossip over the Christmas break.

There's still time to buy your loved ones a copy of MS Word for Christmas. The injunction doesn't take effect until 11th January 2010.
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Oh no, Lotus... surely you wouldn't ...

Installing Lotus Foundations on a client PC is normally a straightforward job - click here, click there, then twiddle my thumbs for five minutes while the code copies down from the server.

Not this time. The install script kept bombing out with 'unable to create file' errors. Two minutes of checking with a text editor found the problem:

set noidfile=no
set logfile=c:\Notes850_Setup.log
echo -------------------- >> %logfile%

A hardcoded 'c:\' in a setup script without a prompt to warn the person installing the software? Surely Lotus wouldn't ... but alas, Lotus did. Of course, this works wonderfully when you are setting up on a PC with a c:\ drive but not so well when the local drive is set to h:\ and a c:\ drive doesn't exist.
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The Mythical Man-Month meets the Yellowverse

In 1975 Fred Brooks wrote a book that he called 'The Mythical Man-Month'. In that book he claimed that assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it even later, due to the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project, as well as the increased communication overhead. I suggest that with the introduction of corporate social software Fred's theory is no longer automatically applicable to the world of software development, because when I want to add a new programming resource to a project I don't always need to involve a new programmer.

Let me explain...

Serious social software tools (which excludes Facebook) foster a community of software resources who are willing to add value to your project without being formally involved. They post code samples and tutorials on their blogs (thanks Declan et. al.) and respond to technical questions in software forums. We all have different reasons for doing this but the end result is that our skill set is made available to other Lotoids without us needing to be fully briefed (or even aware of) their project. So a Man-Month of work for a clued-up developer can be made more productive on demand by incrementally adding the diverse skills of the Yellowverse as required.

The other side of the Man-Month is very real financial pressure felt by larger IT organizations who have a need to optimize their resource usage. If they are paying a developer $100k per year then they naturally want that person to be billable for as many days as possible with minimal management intervention, and the easiest way to do that is to put them on a customer's site for a large slab of time - three months is good and six months is better. And if they can find a way to justify a Team Leader and another Software Specialist in the project then that makes even more profit for them.

In my experience the smaller Business Partners don't work like that. When you are a team of only three or four consultants it doesn't make sense to tie up one third of your resources for six months at a time. You want to get in there and finish the work ASAP to free yourself up for the next opportunity.

So if we look at a paying customer who has a half finished spec (hey... he's a Retailer, not a Business Analyst) then how does he get maximum value for his money? Is his need best met by an organization whose business model thrives on throwing more bodies at the problem (thereby raising the total cost and invoking Fred's curse on his project), or does he get better value by engaging a Business Partner who knows how to work the Yellowverse and how to tap into the zero-cost skill sets of the Lotus Legends?

The answer is obvious... the problem is finding a way to say that into your proposals to customers.
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Running BES and Traveler on the same R8.5 Server

Is it possible to install Traveler on a Domino R8.50 server that is already running BES 5.0?

The server runs on Windows Server 2008.
At first glance I don't see a problem, but has anyone done this before?
Are there any gotchas I need to know about?
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Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

Yesterday I started working with a customer is having all sorts of troubles getting his integrated backup s/w to work with newly upgraded (R8.02 to R8.5) virtualized Domino servers. Now I'm not going to mention the backup s/w name at this point since negotiations are still underway with the vendor about what his documentation meant when he said it " ... supports Domino R8.x ", but I am interested in what experience other people have with backing up R8.5 Domino servers.

What software do you recommend and what do you curse?
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A useful tool for all computer gamers

I play the odd computer game and once I figured out that waiting three months after release halved the price of most boxed games I found I could even afford to play them. My biggest problem has been trying to read the system specs written in 2 point Myopia font on the bottom of the game boxes, but now I've found a website that will do that for me. Well actually its the other way around. The 'CanYouRunIt' site reads my computer specs and advises me whether my PC will support a game selected from their list.

Their list is not exhaustive - no sign of the Diablo franchise (but I already know I need a new computer before Diablo III arrives sometime within the next three years). Still, it's a useful site to bookmark.
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What is the $$$ cost of migrating Notes applications?

I've just started talking to a customer who is looking at migrating away from their R6.5 Notes environment with the help of their current Business Partner. They have the usual half dozen CRM + Helpdesk + Asset Manager apps and " ...will migrate them when the email migration is finished."

OK, we've all heard it before, but what I need is a White Paper which exposes the pain and the cost of rewriting Notes applications in other environments. Does anyone have anything beyond anecdotal evidence which can be presented to a CIO?
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Channelling Don Bradman

I blogged previously about the recent Lotus Cricket day in Bowral and now the intrepid Matt Paddon has posted photographs of the day. I appreciate that our American cousins may not appreciate the finer points of this noble sport however let me draw your attention to the pristine conditions of the grounds and the gentle beauty of the surrounding countryside.

Wouldn't you love to play a social game of your favorite sport on such a beautiful park?

... unless you're into ice hockey I guess.
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Putting the Microsoft Cart before the Lotus Horse

Ed Brill and Thomas Duff have already commented about Microsoft's suggestion of 'discarding' applications that aren't completely supported by Windows 7 or, as Microsoft's Norm Judah puts it...

“There’s also the question as to whether customers really need an (incompatible) application,”

IMHO any Operating System is only useful insofar as it facilitates a users interactions with their chosen software applications which drive their business. If Windows 7 is incapable of supporting those existing applications for a business then it is Windows 7 that is incompatible and should be discarded. After all, a computer with a shiny new operating system which won't run your chosen applications is like the proverbial chocolate teapot.

I probably wouldn't have blogged on this issue except this example of Microsoft's approach to marketing their shiny new technology bought the phrase 'Big Lie' to mind, and while googling that term I came across the following description of ... well, you can guess who (the underlining is mine):

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it".

If Bleeding Yellow meant I had to behave like that then I'd want a blood transfusion ... I guess the standards are different in Redmond.
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No more Mister Nice Guy

We've had an interesting 24 hours with the CMSWatch saga since Carl Tyler first broke the story about the Adriaan Bloem's assertion that IBM was phasing out Notes.

Adriaans response was completely inadequate - he complained that when he wrote 'fact', people thought he meant a 'fact' when actually he didn't. Then his colleague wrote a weasel word retraction claiming that Adriaan 'mis-spoke' when the truth was that Adriaan just didn't bother to check the truth. Now (in comment 13 of Carl's original post) Adriaan is asking if he can borrow a VM Image of Notes to get some experience with the product.

So how can CMSWatch consider themselves competent to write and sell IT industry reports when they have such an enormous chasm in their staff's education. These guys position themselves as vendor-neutral technology experts (I quote from their website: "CMS Watch™ evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions."), yet they seem to have paper-thin technical expertise with regard to Sharepoint's biggest competitor and (apparently) don't have any in-house Notes resources who can help sort out Adriaan's confusion.

So well done Carl for putting CMSWatch on the spot so they could get the caning they so richly deserved. It may not change their product bias but it will make them think twice the next time they want to regurgitate the old Microsoft mantras. I suggest the same 'Boots And All' treatment is applied to any other professional publishers who take the same shortcuts. NOTE: I do not condone abuse or other unprofessional behavior - I am talking about flooding offenders with accurate comments to show where they are wrong and not putting up with weasel word replies.

No more Mister Nice Guy!

OK... OK... the Horse is dead. I'll stop flogging it.


EDIT: The intrepid Michael Sampson has pointed out to me the difference between CMSWire and CMSWatch.

• CMSwatch is the analyst house who penned the Sharepoint Report and also hosted the writings of Adriaan Bloem.

• CMSWire is a totally different organization founded by Brice Dunwoodie.

I have, at times, confused the two - mea culpa. I apologize to CMSWire for my mistake.
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The CMSWatch Emperor has no Clothes

Carl Tyler set the cats among the pigeons when he blogged about CMSWatch's article on 'The Difference between SharePoint and Lotus Notes'. The original CMS post had stated

" ... the fact that IBM is slowly phasing out Domino in favor of newer platforms ... "

and they were quickly smothered by a plethora of Yellowverse comments deriding their lack of knowledge. CMSWatch quickly backpedalled and admitted that they just 'mis-spoke', however it was interesting that it wasn't the original author who issued the retraction and apology (providing you accept that using the weasel word 'mis-spoke' is actually an apology).

So do you think those antics are good enough for a professional advisory service? Most of us get paid nothing for our blogs and that's a fair wage. Now and again one of us generates something of real value (Declan's X-Pages tutorials come to mind as does every second or third post from Nathan Freeman) but the majority of PlanetLotus feeds are just the day-to-day technical soap operas of a bunch of us IT folk - and that's fine by me.

However these CMSWatch people expect you to pay for their opinions. They will sell you an intranet site licence for all of their reports for a cool $16,000 per year or only $950 if you just want to read the Basic Sharepoint Report. But how the heck can their Sharepoint report be of any value when they obviously know so little about the main competitor to Sharepoint?

The list of people featured on their webpage who recommend the Sharepoint report made for interesting reading:

• Barb Mosher, (Senior Editor, CMSWire.com ) ... would she be the person who reviews their work for publication under the CMSxxx brand? If so, then her comments do not constitute an independent review.
• Hugh McKellar, (Editor, KMWorld Magazine ) ... who had just held a joint webinar with CMSWorld about Sharepoint so there is an existing commercial relationship with that reviewer.
• Two quotes each from Michael Sampson ( President, The Michael Sampson Company Ltd) and Paul Culmsee, (IT Consultant, Clever Workaround) ... doubtless they are highly skilled people but their respective websites show that both of them are one-man band consulting outfits who sell Sharepoint consulting services, so once again we don't see evidence of independent review.

There were two other endorsements that I didn't check beyond the ten second scrutiny I gave to the people listed above, but when you combine their demonstrated lack of knowledge about Notes/Domino with the thinness of the Sharepoint Report reviewer's credentials then IMHO CMSWatch have a looooooooooong way to go before they can be taken seriously as 'impartial reviewers' in the collaboration space. These guys seem like Sharepoint Fellow-Travellers who just jumped aboard the 'Let's-bash-Notes' wagon before checking their facts. The problem is, people are probably buying and reading and believing their stuff these guys write.

'mis-spoke' ... what a great word!
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Y us crptc var nm?

There was an interesting article in Omninerd about the need for coding standards and, although you've probably heard most of it before, I'd be interested in feedback about one particular point - cryptic variable names.

We all do code maintenance and (I'm sure) we all encounter code which seems to make no sense at all until we mentally remap the existing variable names into something more understandable.

So why do people call a variable 'dtFHire' when they could name it 'DateOfFirstHire' (or even 'dtOfFirstHire')? Is it an anachronistic habit from days when memory was scarce and variable names limited in length? Is it because they don't like having their code run wordwrapping when they write:

WeeksOfLeaveAccumulated = ((LastPayDate - DateOfFirstHire)/NumberOfDaysInAWeek) * DailyLeaveAllowance) + BonusWeeksAccumulated - NumberIFirstThoughtOf

What is the reason?
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Is Symphony losing the 'hearts and minds' battle?

I use either Notes or Symphony for all of my business doc needs and I'm a firm believer that Symphony is a good investment for IBM and for users. The big problem I see for the product is that it seems to be marginalized by the reviewers. Look at this review by Infoworld which looks at the ongoing battle between Microsoft Office and Google Apps - not a mention of Symphony anywhere in the article.

I know that the current Google/Microsoft war for Apps and OS is sexier than the (yawn) ongoing IBM/Microsoft 100 Years War over email but use awareness is the name of today's game and IBM marketing needs to work harder and smarter to stay in the battle. Maybe if IBM followed Google's lead and provided a competitor to Windows and then put some marketing dollars behind it...
COUGHLotusFoundationsServerCOUGH...

No, I'm just dreaming...

Yes... I know about the 'Lotus Knows' campaign. That's a different type of marketing investment compared to getting the Symphony name into these product-specific reviews done by industry analysts.
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So this blonde walks into a bar ...

Well, not really, but I would guess that 99% of readers would interpret that title as an indication that this post contains a blonde joke... and they're right.

Last year I replaced all the computers in my office with those new energy efficient kind from IBM, and today I got a call from the IBM Business Partner who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.

HELLLOOOOOOO…………..just because I’m blond doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I reminded him what his fast talking sales guy had told me then, that in ONE YEAR these computers would PAY FOR THEMSELVES!

Helllooooo……??? It’s been a year already!

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up..

He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.

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Same Planet ... Different Worlds

I've been through two apparently unrelated incidents in the last 24 hours which have set me thinking that Earth is actually a multiverse with everyone living in their own reality.

Today's incident occured when I went to pick up a package from my Post Office. The attendant behind the counter was quite confrontational and said that I must have lost a notification that the postman had left in my letterbox. Despite my explanation that I had been eagerly checking my mailbox for this package (a new battery for my completely dead mobile phone) for the last week and I had not received any such notification, the attendant aggressively insisted that I was at fault. When I told him I was going to report his confrontational attitude to his management his reply was "You wouldn't do that if I was a white man". Anyway, I've now made the complaint and I'm happy to let the Australia Post Customer Service team review the video footage and decide what action to take. I can shrug off bad customer service but I don't take gratuitous accusations of racism from anybody. My question from that incident is how on earth did this man decide that a complaint about his customer service must be racially motivated?

Yesterday's event was equally baffling. I was at an IBM roundtable meeting which is where Big Blue invites selected Business Partners to chew the fat on selected topics and hopefully gain some consensus about the best direction to take on those issues. One of the key topics at that meeting was about negotiating commercial relationships between individual Business Partners and one of the people present didn't like the idea because (in his words) "I don't trust anybody".

OK, we've all been burned by people we trusted and I'm sure we could all name some business partners who are lacking in ethics. In my case I chose not to trust those who have screwed me in the past (you know who you are) but I'm certainly open to working with new faces on new opportunities. To hear a business person declare that they don't trust anybody seems completely out of this world. You want your customers to trust you, but you're not willing to trust anyone else... what's wrong with this picture?

Let me clarify that I have known this Partner for many years and he is a thoroughly decent person who deserves the success he has achieved. I'm just baffled by his decision not to trust anybody regardless of the circumstances.

Anyway, both of those incidents left me unable to see where the other person was coming from and I now need to (regretfully) walk away from spending more time figuring out what they were thinking.

Same Planet ... Different Worlds.
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Microsoft eliminates Blue Screen of Death!

Prevx reported today that the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has finally been eliminated from Windows. For Windows 7 (and future releases) the "Blue" screen has been upgraded to a "Black" screen of Death. A spokesman for Microsoft said:

"Customers have been complaining for years about the Blue Screen of Death so we finally acted to remove the problem while still retaining backward compatibility with the BSOD acronym. Note that this new feature will not decrease the frequency of the problem but it will bring comfort to millions of users who can see that we are in control of the situation."

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft has already made this feature available as a free upgrade for Vista and XP and slipstreamed it into an automatic update that ran in the last week of October.
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